Doctor Sowell is pretty close to being my favorite American Thinker but but how sad that even he, in this piece, fails to address the real cause of the illusionary "price increases" of oil and gasoline.
Because of the more obscene tha usual inflation of the money supply in which the Fed has recently indulged, via the printing press and via insanely artificially low interest rates [Together AKA Counterfeiting] the value of the USD$ Dollar has been reduced by more than 50% since January 20 2001.
And, in inflation-adjusted US Dollars, the price of oil at $75.00 per barrel is still around $15.00 cheaper than it was in 1981.
For being a part of the cover-up conspiracy of the most insidious method of taxation and of the feral gummint avoiding much of the responsibility for and consequences of its insolvency-creating "deficit spending?"
Shame on you, Doctor Sowell!
Even adjusted for inflation gas and oil prices are higher than they were in 2001.
Sowell is correct. An underlying reality is responsible for the high prices. And his thermometer analogy is a great way of explaining this.
That doesn't mean inflation isn't a problem, but there's much more to the situation that just inflation.